Search Results: White Australia Policy

Deals struck between Prime Minister Gillard and Independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott saw hospitals in their electorates receive preferential treatment ahead of regions with greater needs. Pork-barrelling has always been part of politics, but that does not make it any less of a scandal.

X people work hard. Y people are natural athletes. Z
people treat the world like they own it. Q people are violent. R people
are drunkards. S people mistreat women. V
people are queue jumpers. Racial generalising becomes racist only if we
accept its false premise.

Kevin Rudd's failure to embrace the Timor legend with more imagination and
substance was a missed opportunity to connect with Labor's Second World
War legacy. Wartime Prime Minister John Curtin saw the guerilla war in
Timor as a unique and significant part of turning back the Japanese
tide.

The book was banned after parents complained about its anti-authoritarian attitude: 'Wanja [the dog] loved to chase the [police] van ... to bark at the van ... to bite at the wheel. The police van would drive away.' Like Jewish humour, Aboriginal humour is a response to a history of oppression.

How times change. Early in the 20th Century, it was Protestant
Orangemen who warned Australians not to vote for a Catholic. In the
early 21 Century, such warnings are now delivered by a former Catholic
priest in a publication of the Jesuit Order. –Gerard Henderson, The Sydney Institute

My granddad was a fourth generation white Australian who worked with
sheep. I used to tell the
story that he was a small town racist who disliked Blacks, Catholics and
Jews. The punch line was that his daughter married a Fijian, his son
married a Jew and my dad married a Catholic.

We assume aid is 'helping people'. But the 2006 White Paper on Australian Aid specified its purpose to help countries 'reduce poverty and achieve sustainable development, in line with Australia’s national interest'. We'd be mortified if a church agency came out with such a self-serving clause.

An earlier generation of politicians feared impoverished Asian hordes would pour down and eat our lunch.
Current PM Kevin Rudd worries their offspring can now afford to come armed with the latest weapons and steal it. His fretting comes at great cost to the nation.

Increasing the cost of cigarettes hurts the poor more than the rich. Kevin Rudd is acting with the callous efficiency of The Terminator when he
really needs to find a more equitable incentive to give up smoking.

There is much to salvage from Howard's policies, misconstrued as
universally liberal and bereft of state intervention in the interests of
the underprivileged. More could be done to link such a policy frame with several
aspects of Catholic Social Teaching.

Text from Fr Frank Brennan SJ's presentation Poverty and
Plenty: Where Do or Should Christians Stand? at the Centre for an
Ethical Society as part of the 2010 Series Forum at the Australian
Centre for Christianity and Culture, 17 March 2010.